Omeros (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Derek Walcott
- First Published: 1990
- Type of Work: Poetry
- Time of Work: The present as informed by the past through myth, history, and memory
- Setting: St. Lucia, West Indies
- Principal Characters: Omeros, Achille, Rector, Helen, Philoctete, Major Dennis Plunkett, Maud Plunkett
- Genres: Poetry, Narrative poetry
- Subjects: History, Caribbean, Mythology or myths, Blacks, Race, Poetry or poets, Poverty or poor people, Human race, Native Americans or American Indians, Islands, Fate or fatalism, Heroes or heroism
- Locales: St. Lucia, West Indies
Modern poets have often relied on classical imagery to present their theories of history. William Butler Yeats saw history as a series of cycles, repetitions with variations to which only the poet-artist remained sensitive. Indeed, the poet-artist of Yeats is an adept in the mystical sense who rebuilds civilizations through art after those charged with safeguarding culture, the politicians and diplomats, have helped destroy old ways of life through their failures. In Yeats’s poem “Leda and the Swan” (1923), the poet queries whether the raped Leda could have foreseen that the...
[The entire page is 1906 words long]
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